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The Dorner Disaster

By Tuesday noon two things were very clear. Christopher Dorner could not escape the police and we could not escape the Dorner story. This was a “Made for TV” event. It had guns, violence, murder, revenge and not a small amount of racial overtones. In other words, the Dorner story had everything but sex. I’m sure that omission will be remedied in the movie “based on a true story.”

The coverage was wall to wall. Cable, which had promised to obsess over the up-coming State of the Union, obsessed instead first over the surrounded cabin and then the burning cabin. (This was, incidentally, near Jenks Lake, a part of the world I personally know very well from camps and retreats I’ve attended and led.) So much of the media coverage was hollow and hypocritical. Many interviews began with, “We don’t want to speculate…” Then they asked an expert or a by-stander to speculate. Nature and news abhor vacuums and dead air needs to be filled. So information, misinformation and speculation rush in.

After the first two shootings/murders attributed to Dorner, he did get a kind of crazy cult following. His visual media image was mostly positive. He was shown in a military or police uniform. Sometimes he appeared in full football regalia. He was always smiling and seemed warm and accessible. He never looked like an “angry black man.” He looked more the part of the hero receiving a certificate from former LA Chief Bratton. For a moment it seemed that he might become another marker of our racial divide. That faded away as the scope of his mad revenge became clearer.

Now it’s over, except, of course, for the second-guessing which we will do and must do. We must know why police shot three people without warning who did not fit the description of Dorner. Yes, we know they were justifiably frightened but that is what training and discipline are about. We should also wonder at why so many barricade situations end in fire. From the SLA conflagration in Inglewood, to 50 houses destroyed in Philadelphia in 1985 trying to extricate the Move radicals, to the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas and now to Big Bear.

The last act of this is likely to be political. Some will hold, correctly, that there are too many guns and they are too powerful to be in the community. Others will hold, also correctly, that Dorner would have passed any background check. He was trained, certified as both a Marksman and an Expert, and nothing in his separation from either the Navy or the LAPD would have stopped his buying of guns. Everyone is right. Everyone has rights. So, why does this entire story from the facts to the coverage to the lessons just feel so wrong?